Fuckin' Perfect
by NellieTodd
Summary: Songfic for the song, F**kin' Perfect by P!nk. When Nellie burns the pies, she begins to dwell on her past failures. During her childhood, she had had many, but will soon discover that life isn't all misery and one bad descision after another.


**A few months after this song came out, I had the idea for this fic.**

**A year of forgetting about it, and now here it is!**

**WARNING: CUTTING **

**SUMMARY: Songfic for the song, F**kin' Perfect by P!nk. When Nellie burns the pies, she begins to dwell on her past failures. During her childhood, she had had many, but will soon discover that life isn't all misery and one bad descision after another.**

**NOTE: This is based on the music video, so you need to watch that before reading this fic.**

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The pies were burned beyond help.

Coughing and sputtering, Mrs. Lovett through open the oven doors, only to be greeted by a cloud of thick black smoke.

It was all her fault. She had gotten distracted watching Sweeney stalk past the front window as he went into town in the pouring rain. Visions of her perfect life by the sea clouded her mind for a good twenty minutes. Her mouth formed into a droopy smile. This was the most relaxing moment of the day; sure there were more customers on the way, but this moment she could just enjoy.

That's when Toby came in, his hair wet from taking the trash outside. "Mum, are you alright?"

She whipped around, angry that her thoughts had just been disturbed. "Who do yeh think are to just come bargin' in like that?" Her voice echoed loudly throughout the shop.

The boy jumped back, obviously terrified. "M-Mum I didn't mean to…" It took a moment for him to swallow the lump in his throat and continue. "Bother you!"

"Well as a matter of fact yeh did! Do me a favor and leave the damn kitchen!" Toby's fears got the better of him, and the boy burst into tears. Before Mrs. Lovett had a chance to step forward and comfort him, he fled to his room and slammed the door.

The baker inwardly scolded herself for yelling at him. _The lad does enough for me already! Helpin' with them pies and such…_

_ The pies!_

In her moments of fantasy and anger, she had completely forgotten about the pies in the oven.

She was greeted with a black cloud of smoke as she opened the door. Coughing and sputtering, she waved it away and made a grab for the pies – which she discovered to her dismay were burned beyond recovery.

_"Great! This is just great!" _The lunch rush was due any moment! How was she supposed to feed them?

Angrily, she chucked the burned pies to the ground. "I'm such a failure!" Her cry echoed throughout the bakehouse. No one else was around to hear it. She slumped to the ground and began to cry from all the stress. "This wouldn't be the first time I've failed…"

Her mind wandered. Soon she found herself lost in memories.

The first one was from back when she was a child. Little four year old Nellie was sitting and eating lunch quietly, her favorite doll beside her.

The doll had been a gift from her grandmother before she passed away. It had light brown hair, green glass eyes and wore a pretty white dress with a sash that matched it's eyes.

Her mother chatted quietly in the parlor with her best friend. However, Nellie didn't notice that the friend's son, James, was sneaking up behind her.

While she was distracted by her own thoughts, James snatched her doll from it's chair.

"Nyah, nyah nyah!" he taunted. He waved it in the face of a very angry Nellie. However, she didn't try to grab it, she just watched angrily as he threw it across the room.

"Nellie, no! Get off of him! No!" James mother came running into the room when she heard her son scream for help. Nellie had knocked him to the ground and was now pinning him there.

James' mother yanked her to her feet. "You are a wicked little child! How dare you!"

"I'm very disappointed in you, Eleanor," her own mother chimed in. Nellie just looked at her feet.

A few years later, when she was seven, she was walking outside the fence surrounding Hyde Park, when she caught a glimpse of Victoria Mooney playing a game of croquet with her best friends. She watched enviously as they talked and laughed while they played.

She wanted so badly to play with them! She didn't have any friends of her own, and it didn't help that Victoria and her friends seemed to love to hate her.

For a moment, she thought about going and trying to join them, but then she remembered how just the day before when they placed an egg in her chair at school and made her sit on it, she decided to run home instead, before they saw her.

Later on that day, she was busy working on a cake in her mother's kitchen. She placed it in the oven and then went to the large window by the front door and looked outside. That's when two of those girls passed by the window. Quickly, she dropped to the floor.

Pathetically, she looked up at the mess she'd made from her work in the kitchen. Pushing back a strand of hair, the flour from her hand got onto her face.

When she was 14, Nellie became interested in the idea of sailing. She always thought the ocean was beautiful and dreamed of sailing all around the world.

At last she drummed up enough courage to tell her mother, who didn't exactly approve…

"No daughter of mine is going to become a sailor! I don't even think it's possible for a girl! Now drop all of this nonsense at once and go get ready for school!"

Nellie felt heartbroken as she went to get her books.

At school, things weren't exactly better. Again Nellie failed her exams and just couldn't memorize anything.

Her teacher would yell at her in front of the whole class, "Nellie, you are quite dumb. I don't think you will ever amount to anything."

Nellie would just sink into her seat and act like she didn't hear him.

Of course, in reality, she heard it and every word slowly began to sink in. Soon she began to believe it all.

Her classmates would believe it too. Most of the time while they were hanging out together after school, all she could do was stand from a distance, watching, her heart full of distain.

"Skinny bitches…" she muttered under her breath at the crowd of girls who were walking down the street across from her, chattering away. at one point, one of them noticed her and pointed her out to her friends.

For a minute, Nellie felt her heart skip. Was this girl going to have her included in the group? Or was she just going to be made fun of.

The other girls looked over and then began to giggle.

"Hey Nellie," called one of them. "You looked great in that dunce cap our teacher put on you today!"

_Yep, the latter of the two… _she thought miserably as she quickened her pace down the street.

"Wow, she's so dumb she didn't even hear you," said one of the other girls.

She steered clear from those girls and was never bothered by them again, until she was about 18. She encountered them by chance at a dress shop.

They were all admiring a dress that the woman in the shop was making for one of them. It looked incredibly fancy and expensive. Nellie sneered. Those girls hadn't changed a bit since she last saw them. They were still so self-absorbed.

The dress maker was almost done with it and was incredibly occupied with her work and didn't notice that Nellie was even there – and was now taking one of the dresses on display out of sheer jealousy.

One of the girls, however, noticed and pointed her out to the dressmaker.

"Hey!" he screamed as she was caught red handed. The girls giggled with excitement as he made his way over to a now-shaking Nellie and took back his dress.

"What in bloody hell do you think you're doing?" he snapped. "Get the hell out of 'ere! You're lucky I don't turn you over to the authorities!"

Nellie shuddered, knowing how close she had been to being placed on a hulk. And it would've all been for a stupid dress!

Back at home, Nellie looked at herself in the mirror at her boney body. You could just see the outline of her ribs- and she still felt like she was fat.

As she looked at herself, the memories of those girls laughing at her came back, along with several other mistakes that she had made during her life.

Suddenly she felt very dirty…very, very dirty…

She started a hot bath for herself, locked the bathroom door behind her and as she got into the tub, grabbed hold of her father's shaving razor…

She gasped at the first touch of the blade, but soon the initial pain went away, leaving only a sting. Relaxing herself she went on, each bloody stroke carving another mark into her arm.

Blood dripped into her bathwater, turning it red.

The markings began to look like letters…

She leaned back, ashamed of herself, as she tried not to look at her left arm, which now displayed the word "perfect" in large, bloody letters.

She draped her right arm over the edge of the tub and let the bloody razor slip from her fingers to the floor.

Her memories flashed by her eyes. The final one being of the doll; the doll that James had thrown. The doll that was still on the shelf in her room.

If the doll had survived through all of these years, she suddenly realized, there was no reason why she couldn't.

At this thought, Nellie suddenly felt extremely motivated. She got out of the tub, cleaned off the wound as best she could and made her way to the kitchen.

There she worked late into the night, trying out different recipes for varies foods, each one coming out better than her last.

Over the next few months, friends of the family began to drop by for a taste of Nellie's creations, her meat pies turning out to be the most popular. One of them, James' mother, in fact, suggested that she ought to open her own shop.

A few years later, Nellie was at the counter, incredibly busy baking, on the opening of her new Meat Pie Emporium on Fleet Street. She certainly had an impressive crowd before her.

She smiled. She had finally found something she was good at!

"Excuse me, may I please get a meat pie?"

She spun around to face her customer. "What type of meat would yeh like, sir? we have-" She stopped when she saw his eyes. They were deep and caught her attention right away.

The man, who was a bit large, noticed her eyes as well. For a moment they just stood staring, until Nellie looked away, embarrassed.

"Comin' right up sir..." she said.

She took a break and had dinner with him. His name was Albert and he was falling in love fast with her. She was falling for him as well.

A year or so later, she found herself in the same bed as him on their wedding night.

"Mrs. Lovett?" The memories quickly faded away as she heard Mr. Todd's voice in front of her. That's when she noticed she was still sitting on the floor and the barber was now standing over her. "You have several customers upstairs, wondering where you are."

"Oh!" Nellie suddenly remembered, scrambling to her feet. Then she also remembered about the burned pies. "Ask them if they could wait another 'alf an hour, could yeh, love? I…burned the pies," Her cheeks turned red and it caused Sweeney's lips tugged upward in one of his half-smiles as he turned to walk up the stairs. "Eleanor Lovett, you are definitely not like other women!"

She was confused. "What do yeh mean by that?"

The barber turned back around. "I mean, you certainly are something interesting, Mrs. Lovett!" He let out another slight chuckle as he headed for the stairs, shaking his head.

Mrs. Lovett felt herself smile as she went to prepare new pies.

Later that night after the customers had all been fed and left and she was changed into her nightgown, she decided to check on Toby. Quietly, she opened the door to Toby's bedroom. She had allowed him to take the evening off because how she had yelled at him earlier that day. And even though she felt like she was ready to drop from exhaustion, she couldn't help but smile at the sight of Toby curled up in his bed with a bottle of gin in his arms.

Walking on tiptoe, she went to him and slowly removed the bottle from his grasp and picked up his stuffed bear that she had bought for him awhile back. Even though he had claimed he was too old for toys, Nellie gently slipped it into his arms. e snuggled up to it in his sleep.

As she looked at her adoptive son, she whispered, _You are perfect… _and tucked the blanket up to his chin before leaving the room. With one last glance at him, she shut his door and made her way to her bedroom, where she gazed up at a shelf. On it sat her old childhood doll. Carefully, she took t down from the shelf and placed it on her bedside as she crawled into bed to go to sleep herself.

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**Read and review, lovies!**

**NellieTodd**


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